"Roch.e.l.le, is that you?"

The light was not on inside, however. Obviously a tap had simply been left to run. Lamar pushed the door open.

From inside, Buddy spoke: "No light, please."

Without the c.o.ke in his system Lamar would have been out of the house before the ghost spoke again, but the drug pumped him up long enough for Buddy to rea.s.sure his partner that there was nothing to be afraid of.

"She said you were here," Lamar breathed.

"You didn't believe her?"

"No."

"Who are you?"

"What do you mean: who am I? It's Jimmy. Jimmy Lamar."

"Of course. Come in. We should have words."

"No...I'll stay out here."

"I can't hear you too well."

"Turn off the water."

"I need it to p.i.s.s."

"You p.i.s.s?"

"Only when I drink."

"You drink?"

"Do you blame me, with her down there and me unable to touch her?"

"Yeah. That's too bad."

"You'll have to do it for me, Jimmy."

"Do what?"

"Touch her. You're not gay are you?"

"You know better than that."

"Of course."

"The number of women we had together."

"We were friends."

"The best. And I must say you're real sweet, letting me have Roch.e.l.le."

"She's yours. And in return-"

"What?"

"Be my friend again."

"Buddy. I missed you."

"I missed you, Jimmy."

"You were right," he said when he got downstairs. "Buddy is here."

"You saw him."

"No, but he spoke to me. He wants us to be friends. Him and me. And you and me. Close friends."

"Then we will be."

"For Buddy."

"For Buddy."

Upstairs, the Jaff turned this new and unexpected element in the game over, and judged it good. He had intended to pa.s.s himself off as Buddy-a trick all too easy, given that he'd drunk down the man's thoughts-to Roch.e.l.le only. In that form he'd come visiting two nights before, and found her drunk in her bed. It had been easy to coax her into believing he was her husband's spirit; the only difficult part had been preventing himself from claiming marital rights. Now, with the partner under the same delusion, he had two agents in the house to a.s.sist him when the guests arrived.

After the events of the previous night he was glad he'd had the foresight to organize the party. Fletcher's machinations had caught him off-guard. In that act of self-destruction his enemy had contrived to put a sliver of his hallucigenia-producing soul into a hundred, maybe two hundred minds. Even now the recipients were dreaming up their personal divinities; and making them solid. They would not, on past evidence, be particularly barbaric; certainly not the equals of his terata. Nor, without their instigator alive to fuel them, would they linger long on this plane of being. But they could still do his well-laid plans much mischief. He might well need the creatures he could summon from the hearts of Hollywood to prevent Fletcher's last testament from interfering.

Soon, the journey that had begun the first time he'd heard of the Art-so long ago he couldn't even remember from whom-would end with his entering Quiddity. After so many years of preparation it would be like coming home. He'd be a thief in Heaven, and therefore King of Heaven, given that he'd be the only presence there qualified to steal the throne. He would own the dreamlife of the world; be all things to all men, and never be judged.

There were two days left, then. The first, the twenty-four hours it would take him to realize that ambition.

The second, the day of the Art, when he would reach the place where dawn and dusk, noon and night, occurred at the same perpetual moment.

Thereafter, there was only forever.

V.

For Tesla, leaving Palomo Grove was like waking from sleep in which some dream-tutor had instructed her that all life was dreaming. There would be no simple division from now on between sense and nonsense; no arrogant a.s.sumption that this experience was real and this one not. Maybe she was living in a movie, she thought as she drove. Come to think of it that wasn't a bad idea for a screenplay: the story of a woman who discovered that human history was just one vast family saga, written by that underrated team Gene and Chance, and watched by angels, aliens and folks in Pittsburgh who had tuned in by accident and were hooked. Maybe she'd write that story, once this adventure was over.

Except that it would never be over; not now. That was one of the consequences of seeing the world this way. For better or worse she would spend the rest of her life antic.i.p.ating the next miracle; and while she waited, inventing it in her fiction, so as to p.r.i.c.k herself and her audience into vigilance.

The drive was easy, at least as far as Tijuana, and left room for such musings. Once she had crossed the border, however, she had to consult the map she'd bought, and was obliged to postpone any further plottings or prophecies. She had committed Fletcher's instructions to memory like an acceptance speech, and they-with help from the map-proved good. Never having travelled the peninsula before she was surprised to find it so deserted. This was not an environment in which man and his works had much hope of sustained existence, which led to the expectation that the Mission ruins, when she reached them, would most likely have been eroded, or swept away into the Pacific, whose murmur grew in volume as her route took her closer to the coast.

She could not have been more wrong in that expectation. As she rounded the bend of the hill Fletcher had directed her to, it was immediately apparent that the Mision de Santa Catrina was very much intact. The sight made her innards churn. A few minutes' drive, and she'd be standing before the site at which an epic story-of which she knew only the tiniest part-had begun. For a Christian, perhaps Bethlehem would have aroused the same excitement. Or Golgotha.

It was not a place of skulls, she found. Quite the reverse. Though the fabric of the Mission had not been rebuilt-its blasted rubble was still spread over a substantial area-somebody had clearly preserved it from further dissolution. The reason for that preservation only became apparent once she'd parked the car, some way off from the building, and approached on foot across the dusty ground. The Mission, built for holy purpose, deserted, then turned to an endeavor its architects would surely have deemed heretical, was once again sanctified.

The closer she approached the jigsaw walls, the more evidence she found before her. First, the flowers, laid in rough bunches and wreaths among the scattered stones, their colors brilliant in the clear sea air.

Second, and more poignant, the small bundles of domestic items-a loaf, a jug, a door handle-that had been bound up with sc.r.a.ps of scrawled-upon paper and laid among the blossoms in such profusion she could scarcely take a step without treading on something. The sun was slipping away now, but its deepening gold only served to enhance the sense that this was a haunted place. She negotiated the rubble as quietly as she could, for fear of disturbing its occupants, human or otherwise. If there were miraculous beings in Ventura County (walking the streets, no less, unabashed) how much more likely that here, on this lonely headland, there should be wonder-workers?

Who they might be, and what shape (if any) they took, she didn't even concern herself to try to guess. But if the number of gifts and supplications laid underfoot testified to anything it was that prayers were answered here.

The bundles and the messages left outside the Mission were affecting enough, but those inside were more moving still. She stepped through a gap in one of the walls into a silent crowd of portraits: dozens of photographs and sketches of men, women and children fixed to the stone along with a fragment of clothing, or a shoe; even spectacles. What she'd wandered through outside had been gifts. These, she guessed, were items for some bloodhound G.o.d to sniff. They belonged to missing souls, brought here in the hope that the powers would usher the lost back on to a familiar road and so bring them home.

Standing in the gilded light, surveying this collection, she felt like an intruder. Religious displays had seldom if ever moved her. The sentiments were so smug in their certainty, the images so rhetorical. But this display of simple faith touched a nerve she'd thought numbed by cant. She recalled the way she'd felt the first time she'd returned home for Christmas after a self-imposed exile from the family bosom of five years. It had been as claustrophobic as she'd antic.i.p.ated, but at midnight on Christmas Eve, walking on Fifth Avenue, a forgotten feeling had sucked all the breath from her, and brought her to tears in an instant: that once she had believed. That belief had come from inside, out. Not taught, not bullied, just there. The first tears that had come were grat.i.tude for the bliss of knowing belief again; their sisters, sadness that it pa.s.sed as quickly as it had come, like a spirit moving through her and away.

This time, it didn't go. This time it deepened in her, as the sun deepened in color, sinking towards the sea.

The sound of somebody moving, deep in the ruins, broke her reverie. Startled, she let her quickened pulse slow a little before asking: "Who's there?"

There was no reply. Cautiously she ventured past the wall of lost faces and through a lintel-less door into a second chamber. It had two windows, like eyes in the brick, through which the setting sun delivered two ruddy beams. She had nothing except instinct to support the feeling, but she didn't doubt that this was the temple's most sacred place. Though it had no roof, and its eastern wall was grievously damaged, the place seemed charged, as though forces had accrued in it over a period of years. Its function, when Fletcher had occupied the Mission, had evidently been that of laboratory. There were benches overturned on every side, the equipment that had toppled from them apparently left where it had fallen. Neither offerings nor portraits had been allowed to disrupt this sense of a place preserved. Though sand had gathered around the fallen furniture, and seedlings sprouted here and there, the chamber was as it had been: testament to a miracle; or to its pa.s.sing.

The protector of the sanctum stood in the corner furthest from Tesla, beyond the shafts from the window. She could make out little about him. Only that he was either masked or had features as broadly formed as those of a mask. Nothing she'd experienced here so far led her to fear for her safety. Though she was alone, she felt no anxiety. This was a sanctuary not a place of violence. Besides, she came on the business of the deity that had once worked in this very chamber. She had to speak with his authority.

"My name's Tesla," she said. "I was sent here by Doctor Richard Fletcher."

She saw the man in the corner respond to the name with a slow upward motion of the head; then heard him sigh.

"Fletcher?" he said.

"Yes," Tesla replied. "Do you know who he is?"

The answer was another question delivered with a heavily Hispanic accent: "Do I know you?"

"I told you," Tesla said. "He sent me here. I've come to do what he himself asked me to do."

The man stepped away from the wall, far enough for his features to touch the beams.

"Could he not come himself?" he said.

It took Tesla a few moments to muster a reply. The sight of the man's heavy brow and lumpen nose had thrown her thoughts into a spin. Quite simply she'd never seen in the flesh a face so ugly.

"Fletcher isn't alive any more," she replied after a moment, her thoughts half on repugnance, half on how instinctively she'd avoided using the word dead.

The wretched features in front of her became sorrowful, something in their plasticity almost making a caricature of that emotion.

"I was here when he left," the man said. "I've been waiting for him to...come back."

She knew who he was as soon as he proffered this information. Fletcher had told her there might be a living remnant of the Great Work left.

"Raul?" she said.

The deep-set eyes grew wide. They showed no whites. "You do know him," he said, and took another quicker step into the light, which carved his features so cruelly she could barely look at him. She'd countless times seen creatures on the screen more studiedly vile than this-and the night before been bloodied by a beast of nightmare design-but the confusion of signals from this hybrid distressed her more than anything she'd set eyes on. It was so close to being human, yet her innards were not deceived. The response taught her something, though she wasn't quite certain what. She put the lesson aside for more urgent stuff.

"I've come to destroy whatever remains of the Nuncio," she said.

"Why?"

"Because Fletcher wants it that way. His enemies are still in the world, even though he isn't. He fears for the consequences if they come here and find the experiment."

"But I've waited..." Raul said.

"It's good that you did. It's good you guarded the place."

"I haven't moved. All these years. I've stayed where my father made me."

"How have you survived?"

Raul looked away from Tesla, squinting into the sun, which was almost gone from sight.

"The people look after me," he said. "They don't understand what happened here, but they know I was a part of it. The G.o.ds were on this hill, once. That's what they believe. Let me show you."

He turned and led Tesla out of the laboratory. Beyond the door was another, barer chamber; this with a single window. The walls had been painted, she saw; murals whose naive rendering merely emphasized the pa.s.sion with which they were felt.

"This is the story of that night," Raul said, "as they believe it happened."

There was no more light here than in the room they'd exited, but the murk lent mystery to the images.

"Here's the Mission as it was," Raul said, indicating an almost emblematic picture of the cliff upon which they were standing. "And there's my father."

Fletcher stood in front of the hill, face white and wild against its darkness, his eyes twin moons. Strange forms sprang from his ears and mouth, and hung around his head like satellites.

"What are those?" Tesla enquired.

"His ideas," came Raul's reply. "I painted those."

"What kind of ideas look like that?"

"Things from the sea," came the reply. "Everything comes from the sea. Fletcher told me that. At the beginning, the sea. At the end, the sea. And between-"

"Quiddity," said Tesla.

"What?"

"He didn't tell you about Quiddity?"

"No."

"Where humans go to dream?"

"I'm not human," Raul gently reminded her. "I'm his experiment."